Subway’s Slide in Performance Leaves Straphangers Fuming

Commuters riding the C line in Manhattan. Subway delays have jumped to more than 70,000 each month, from about 28,000 per month in 2012.Credit
Christian Hansen for The New York Times

Subway riders in New York City have become increasingly angry about the quality of service. Their fury is justified.

After a long period of improvement, the system’s reliability has dropped significantly, with delays more than doubling over the last five years, according to a review of data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Subway delays have jumped to more than 70,000 each month, from about 28,000 per month in 2012, according to the data. On some lines, trains arrive late to their final destination well over half the time.

Adding to the misery is worsening mechanical performance — a troubling sign that the train fleet is not being adequately replaced or maintained and a problem that has contributed to the spike in delays. The average distance that subway cars travel between breakdowns was about 120,000 miles in November, down from 200,000 in November 2010.

The decline in service is frustrating many passengers as they stew on stalled trains, pressing uncomfortably close to other riders and worrying about being late to work. When an overstuffed train arrives, commuters must decide whether to squeeze aboard or wait for another, however long that takes.

Subway riders have unleashed a torrent of complaints on social media, venting that poor service is becoming the norm. With increasingly regularity, it seems, the transit agency has been issuing sigh-inducing alerts on Twitter: a police investigation on the D line; a sick passenger at Grand Central Station; elevator repairs leading to unsafe crowds on the No. 1 line.

Erin Buckley was caught in one of the delays this month when her F train stopped abruptly in Manhattan. A mechanical problem left her stuck on board for more than half an hour.

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The commuter rush on the C train in Manhattan. Many riders have grown increasingly vexed and frustrated over the subway system’s decline in performance.Credit
Christian Hansen for The New York Times

“The last few months have been maddening,” said Ms. Buckley, 27, who lives in Brooklyn.

New York’s century-old subway is straining to handle nearly six million passengers each day — its greatest ridership since the 1940s and up from about four million in the 1990s. More than a third of subway delays are caused by overcrowding, which accounted for nearly 30,000 delays in November. As passengers jostle to get on and off, trains must sit longer in stations, leading to a cascade of delays along a line.

Aging subways in other cities, like London and Boston, are also struggling with overcrowding, and Tokyo famously uses staff to jam passengers onto crowded trains. It is difficult to compare performance among cities because systems measure it differently, but some newer subways are known for punctuality, including Hong Kong’s, which boasts that 99 percent of trains are on time.

In New York, many riders mistakenly blame Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, for their subway woes since the system serves four of the city’s five boroughs. But the transportation authority is, in fact, controlled by another Democrat, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who has recently focused his attention on promoting the long-awaited opening of the Second Avenue subway in Manhattan — three new stations serving a strip of the Upper East Side.

Transit advocates are pressing Mr. Cuomo to expend the same level of urgency on improving service across the system.

“If the governor is going to take credit for opening the Second Avenue subway on time, he has to take responsibility for all of the things that are not working on the subway,” said John Raskin, the executive director of the Riders Alliance, an advocacy group.

A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, Jon Weinstein, defended the governor’s record, saying he had secured the largest capital plan in the authority’s history to finance improvements that would help reduce delays. The $29.5 billion plan includes buying new subway cars and upgrading signals and tracks.

“Anyone who claims this governor hasn’t been focused on improving the M.T.A. simply isn’t paying attention or doesn’t understand how long these challenges went unaddressed,” Mr. Weinstein said in a statement.

Still, only 67 percent of subway trains reach their final station within five minutes of the transportation authority’s schedule on weekdays — a drop of about 15 percentage points since 2012. Some lines, like the No. 2 and No. 5, have particularly dismal on-time rates of less than 40 percent.

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One of the older trains in the fleet, a C train, pulling into the 42nd Street station in Manhattan last week.

Credit
Christian Hansen for The New York Times

The authority’s interim executive director, Veronique Hakim, argued that the subway system was more reliable than critics claimed, but she said officials were working to bring down delays. The agency is deploying staffers at busy stations to direct traffic; ordering open-end subway cars with accordionlike connectors instead of doors at the ends of cars, opening up more space; and improving signals to run more trains, she said.

“There is not one single panacea that’s going to solve this,” Ms. Hakim said in an interview. “This is about tackling many fronts.”

Ms. Hakim said the reliability of trains, known as mean distance between failure, had dropped because it had reached an artificially high level when a large order of new subway cars arrived in 2010. The figures will improve, she said, when a batch of new cars begins to arrive this year.

New York’s subway is also one of the few systems in the world that run 24 hours a day, adding to wear and tear and leaving few windows for workers to perform maintenance on the tracks.

Despite their deteriorating performance, subway cars are far more reliable than they were in the 1980s, when the system was plagued by financial shortfalls that crippled service; in 1981, trains broke down every 6,000 miles. But David L. Gunn, a former subway leader who helped turn around the system in the 1980s, said even older cars could perform well if properly maintained.

“If you do the scheduled overhaul of a car fleet on a regular basis, you shouldn’t get a rapid decline in the reliability,” Mr. Gunn said.

The reliability of the subway’s 6,400 cars varies by model. The oldest R32 cars, which arrived in the 1960s, travel only about 32,000 miles between failures. Those cars should have been replaced by now, but an order of 300 new cars was delayed by more than a year because of problems with the manufacturer, Bombardier.

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Only 67 percent of subway trains reach their final station within five minutes of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s schedule.Credit
Christian Hansen for The New York Times

The authority plans to buy an additional 1,025 subway cars, many of which will have the open gangway design that is popular in Toronto and London, but those cars may not arrive until 2020 or later. Plans to upgrade the signal system will require decades of work and billions of dollars.

For New Yorkers, the subway disruptions have painful consequences. On a recent morning, a delay on the C train caused Taylor Gordon to be a half-hour late to a job interview at a fast-food restaurant.

Mr. Gordon, who lives in East New York in Brooklyn, said he was exasperated by frequent delays, especially since fares are scheduled to rise again in March.

“I feel like we spend so much money on subway service,” he said, “and the service has not gotten any better.”

Veronica Rodriguez, also of Brooklyn, said she welcomed the demise of the C line’s screeching 1960s-era cars. She said she wished the authority would improve the signals to streamline train traffic.

“Since they just opened up the Second Avenue subway, maybe they could get some funding over here on the C train,” Ms. Rodriguez said.

When Jenny Cheng is in a rush, she hails an Uber car instead of riding the subway. A car pool trip from her home on the Upper West Side to work costs about $5.

“I don’t know how long I have to wait,” she said, “so I just Uber, and it’s much faster.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 13, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Slide in New York Subway’s Service Leaves Straphangers Fuming. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe